Magic Leap is on the verge of receiving a financial boost as it readies the release of its much-anticipated augmented reality product.
The mysterious Florida-based startup was founded in 2010 and quickly raised $1.4 billion in funding from companies like Google, Alibaba, and venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz. Magic Leap is now in talks with Singapore-based Temasek Holdings to raise another $500 million, bringing its total valuation to nearly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg report.
Though it still hasn’t publicly released a product, Magic Leap is arguably the most intriguing player in AR. It promises to bring a fully-realized AR product to millions of homes, seamlessly merging the digital world with reality.
“We are not about building cool prototypes,” Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post. “We are scaling up so we can manufacture hundreds of thousands of systems, and then millions. That requires a level of perfection, testing, and attention to detail by determined professionals. We have made something that is small, mobile, powerful, and we think pretty cool.”
Its first wearable will be priced between $1,500 and $2,000, according to the report. That would make it at least an iPhone X cheaper than the developer version of Microsoft’s in-production “mixed reality” headset, HoloLens.
Here’s a 2015 video showing the company’s augmented reality technology in action. The quiet, buzzword-free video plays out like a creepy Neill Blomkamp movie ad complete with a friendly holographic robot.
And here’s another for all you Star Wars fans out there.
H/T TechCrunch
